Misdirection
by lone astronomer
Summary: Directions from point A to B. HC.


Misdirection

Note: Because there's got to be a step between her character, first and second season.

Disclaimer: No profit, no infrigement intended.

When she gets home that night to find her pet fish floating belly-up in his bowl, she isn't sure for a minute whether it's the last straw, whether she has any genuine emotion left over, after everything, to feel anything but darkly amused at Death's timing in coming for Fluffy. Then the shock wears off and she cries a little, sad and lonely, and puts his little body in a Dixie cup to bury in her best friend's garden. (She can't stand the thought of flushing a body down the toilet. Not even a fish. She wishes she'd listened to her mother and never got attached to him in the first place.) Then she finds some ice cream, and the teddy bear her big brother sent when her husband died, and watches Steel Magnolias and Gone with the Wind as she lays awake in bed.

Somewhere, she thinks, is a big black leather-bound book with her name on it, in a room full of other books just like it with other people's names. Of course, no one can see its pages, but if they could, they wouldn't understand anyway. What was written down wasn't meaningful. Some words- like 'nobility complex' and 'obsessive curiosity' (and yes, she thinks, they describe her but they aren't her, and nobody can seem to tell the difference). There is no sense of authorship. The things in the book just happened, they might as well have happened to someone else because the words aren't hers. (And so many pages left blank; she wonders bleakly how she can ever do enough to merit the filling of those pages, waiting, expectant.)

Her hopelessness is misinterpreted, usually as sunny optimism. If she wasn't so tired she'd probably be amused. But she is too busy being careful not to show her desperation and doesn't have the energy to care. She doesn't have the energy for a lot of things; she stays in shape and makes sure she's a good doctor and cleans (-_cleaned_, she amends) the fishbowl once a week and that's all there's room for, no social life, except for one friend who stubbornly refuses to succumb to the yawning pit of Cameron's emotional distance.

Sometimes she finds herself breaking her own rules. She made the first mistake when she was twenty-one, before she knew it was a mistake, before she knew anything. Sometimes she falls in love and with House she can't help it, she's drawn to him. (_Like a moth to a flame_, she muses, _or maybe a flame to another flame. A moth to another moth? _It doesn't matter.) But she's not naive and she's certainly not optimistic. They're so alike, she thinks, and it's no wonder all her youthful hope for the world is dead. (That's cotton candy in her hand but it's just glucose in her mouth, and that laugh, beneath the giggles, is brittle if you know how to listen.) The date- the _real_ reason for the date- is a push and not a pull. He is like her, she can tell, but she knows he's stronger. She knows he will crush her before that long-gone hope reignites.

She fails to be relieved when the blow comes because she's still in love with him. (_There are children starving in Africa_, he says with a sneer at her untouched plate, and she looks pointedly at his own half-eaten dinner and purposefully finishes every bite.) Sometimes- she doesn't like to remember it- sometimes in her head she thinks about that day in the lab, about _why do you like me_, and comes up with a better answer. In her head she asks him, boldly, _Do you believe in fate?_ and when he answers no, she just smirks and walks away. Sometimes she can't push him away, even in her head. (_I'm over you, okay? I hate you, just like everyone else._ As she says the words her mind chants his mantra, _everybody lies_, and she feels like she has to be sick.)

She is halfway through the pint before she allows herself to think of today, of her anxious questions in the house of the terminally underprivileged. Cuddy thinks she has her all figured out, she knows. Odd that she has another desperate woman so convinced. But she isn't asking (she doesn't need to know, she pretends) about House and Cuddy, past, present, future. What she is saying with her half-exasperated _why not?_ is - (please, please give me a reason. Motivation. Anything.) - is _I thought I could learn to hate him from the master. I should have asked Foreman._ Because she can't go on, not like this, and when Cuddy says _Could you be a little less subtle? _she pauses for a moment, thinking she's really been caught, before she remembers her facade.

There's no one left that sees through it now, except maybe the elusive friend, who will never say anything. Fluffy (the last of her honesty, to herself) is inaccessible to her now, and no one else is there to try. She turns off the television, exhausted (but not soon enough to avoid Clark Gale's famous words, which she mutters along with him, almost savouring their bitter aftertaste)

My dear, I don't give a damn---


End file.
